Previous topic - https://tildes.net/~comp/1jsx/my_even_smaller_keyboard_upgrade

I'm making this a new topic because this keyboard once again got me to think about a couple of interesting things in regards to both having a smaller keyboard and how to actually make that work. Plus while niche as hell I'd like to contribute some sort of topic to tildes every now and then. For this one i'll be rambling about some of the reasons I've stuck with these things, and the sorts of design concepts it's forced me to think about and problems I ran into (like where the hell the shift key is).

1. Power users and the Nav cluster -

The nav cluster is the Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn/Delete/Insert section and maybe the arrow keys below it on a standard fullsize keyboard. These keys are SUPER useful for text and other sorts of navigation, to the point that it seems most "power user" systems(IDE's or even things like vim, or vimum for browsers) just remap the functionality to somewhere that can be easily reached.

In fact moving the nav cluster and numpad to be somewhere easier to access, so i wasn't constantly moving my hand back and forth, was one of the main reasons I started looking into custom keymaps and eventually smaller keyboards. Being able to trivially hit Home/End without lifting my hands is just so much nicer.

I mention all this to show you the kind of thinking that originally went into me going down this rabbit hole.
In essence:
I wanted to type/navigate faster, oh you can use these keys to be faster, but wait, i'm only a little bit faster and it's MUCH more annoying because I constantly have to move my right hand back and forth, how do I stop that?

Thus i'm always somewhat surprised at how vehemently people can get about remapping keys. Having Up/Down/Left/Right on I/K/J/L with Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn on U/O/Y/H is super intuitive(right handed WASD, with home/end/pgup/pgdwn in line with their corresponding movement) and makes flying around the screen so much easier, and can also open up keybindings that were otherwise used with just porting all this functionality to keys you can easily hit.

2. Chords, and the first major problem -

I'm sure there's a more technical definition but for the purposes of this topic chords are anytime you're hitting one or more keys at once. Shift + a is a chord for A. Ctrl+Shift+Esc is a chord for opening the task manager on windows.

One of the things you don't instantly think about when you get into smaller boards is what chords are popular, and how adding layers to your workflow will affect them. You really want your modifier keys to be accessible at all times, and in a way that makes sense. I don't have a problem that since my Esc key is not on the base layer, the Ctrl+Shift+Esc becomes Ctrl+Shift+Space+Tab for me. To break that down, Ctrl+Shift are on all layers, Space, when held, is the modifier to go to one of my other layers, and on that layer tab becomes esc.

In short, I've added one extra key to the chord, and it doesn't bug me.

What DID bug me, was that with this smaller keyboard, I no longer had room on the left side to put all of those modifier keys. You'll notice that the chord can be easily hit with your left hand alone, and with my previous map, I had shift on the right side. So now I need two hands to hit this chord instead of one. Oh well, right? It's just one chord and I need to use both hands...., whatever?

3. Oh yeah, the mouse......oh shit -
While I do think that more software should be written to allow mostly keyboard interaction, the mouse still serves a useful purpose in my ideal world. Being right handed, I use my right hand for the mouse. Sure I have some mouse functionality bound on one of my layers, but that's not going to replace the speed and precision of the mouse.

And that brings me to Win+Shift+S on windows for taking screenshots. Or more precisely, for selecting an area to take this screenshot....using the mouse.

First off, if you didn't know about this chord and you're on windows, please use it, it's fantastic for those quick "no i mean this" moments where you're trying to send someone a picture of a problem.

Second, this chord SUCKED on my new keyboard layout. On any of my previous keyboards including a normal one, I could hit this chord with just my left hand alone, while I moved my right hand to the mouse to quickly select the area I wanted and then edit it (often drawing red lines around the buttons I needed someone to click on...again....as mentioned in the documentation......).

My new layout had shift on my right hand, and oh dear god did I quickly realize how many other little workflows suck when you need to use both hands to hit the chord and THEN lift up and move it over to the mouse. Most importantly, multiple line/file selection, now required me to move my right hand to the mouse, and my left hand to the right keyboard, so I could hold shift and select things.

Or in overly dramatic terms, lo i had flown too close to the sun and was falling!

4. Wandering in the dark -

For those that for some reason don't have the 5x3 Chiri CE physical layout memorized, here it is (bottom one).

First try:
Move shift to the top button of the left thumb cluster. This was currently tab, but clearly I needed shift on my left hand more. Tab cold go on the right middle, where shift had been, and shift can go where tab was. Problem solved.

No good. That key is often hit with my index finger instead of my thumb, making something like shift+t/g/b super annoying. Hitting that key with your thumb actually requires a shifting of your hands position, and thus feels unnatural.

Worse, the key below it is my space/layer button, so something like shift+ctrl+left, to select previous words(left in this case being space + j), was super uncomfortable to hit. Just moving my thumb up to hit both keys at once did not feel good as I couldn't properly apply pressure and it just felt weird, but I wouldn't be shocked if some people out there are comfortable with that.

Second try:
Ok, we'll just move one of the other 3 thumb keys on the left to the right and put shift there, probably the win key.

No good. Ctrl and Win (or gui/super/meta/whatever) are just as important as shift. That small cluster being close to each other on normal keyboards, so they're left hand control only, means that almost ALL programs assume as much and have built their default hotkeys around it.

Windows window movement and terminal navigation being two of the bigger ones that affected me. Further this still wouldn't solve my win+shift+S screenshot issue, as now i'm just moving the windows key over there. There's no way in hell i'm putting ctrl on the right side because that's also constantly used in assuming its on the left side for various hotkeys, shortcuts, and other behaviors.

Third try:
It was at this point I was entertaining finally looking into homerow modifiers and setting up tap/double tap modifiers instead of hold. I'm still skeptical of how useful any of that is (but being open minded because of course I was skeptical of all of this and now I preach it), and realllly didn't want to go down that road for all sorts of little workflow reasons I was worried it'd collide with.

5. The solution. Pinkies and two shifts -

This stumped for for about two days after I'd decided I just couldn't live with right shift (there were plenty of other awkward workflow things due to having the number layer key be the leftmost thumb on the right pad). I'd really been trying to practice getting used to hitting both thumb keys with my thumb, as I assumed that might be the solution, and unlike basically every other adjustment I've ever had to make for a keyboard, this just felt rough.

So I took a break and just thought about my previous and normal keyboards. Well, again, in those cases, all these chords assume you're using your thumb for one modifier, and your pinky for the other. Sooooo why not just do that?

Thus the solution was born:
MT(MOD_LSFT, KC_X)
MT(MOD_RSFT, KC_SLSH)

For the few of you who don't have your Via/QMK mappings memorized, this just says that if I tap the key in question, type z (or / for the second one), and if I hold the key in question, treat it as if I'm holding the shift key.

So my shift keys are now used by my pinky, just like normally. I have them on Z and /, so I can easily hold either for whatever chord. If I need something like ctrl+shift+z I can just use the right shift, and ditto for ctrl+shift+/.

Even better, this was already my natural inclination. It only took a bit for me to find out just how much faster and easier this was making things, as I already was used to the idea of moving my left pinky downwards to hit shift. In fact, it was even easier than normal. Every now and then I'll get zi instead of I because I didn't hold the key long enough for it to trigger the "shift" function, and I could get really messy and start screwing with how long the keyboard takes to recognize the difference between a press and a tap, but I'm super happy with it.

6. Conclusion -
My wife is right to judge me and I don't care from my superior position in typing valhalla.

I believe this is a interesting issue to post it here because it's very difficult to get writing tools outside the English language. That's exactly why I ended up starting this project. If it's not allowed, I apologise in advance.

I'm a linguist and technical writer (tech writer, dev writer, documenter, technical editor, etc.) and I've always used Hemingway for my English writing. The problem was that I'd never found a text editor capable of suggesting possible improvements to a text in Brazilian Portuguese.

Years passed, and this week I had time to create a fork of Techscriptor with some interface improvements and adapt it to Brazilian Portuguese. That's how version 0.1 of Verbalize was born.

What does it do?

In a basic and summarised way, you can upload a file from your computer (in md or txt, for now) and the editor, besides allowing you to actually edit, will give you hints on how to improve the text (long sentences, complex words, jargon, adjectives and other things we should avoid in texts, especially technical ones).

Once edited, you can download the file in md format.

Access

The application can be installed (Electron), accessed through the web, or you can download the code from GitHub and run it locally in your browser.

• Live version
• Source code

Improvements

I have a few 'next steps' in mind:

• Google Drive/Onedrive integration.
• Possibility to upload a custom rules file.
• Allow it to be used offline as well.
• Improve the GUI.

This was my first time trying working with a laser cutter! I wanted to make a house warming gift, and thought that this could be a nice way to get familiar with the laser cutter. The house warming gift was the mistborn wheel. But after I made that I kinda of caught the itch and wanted to make something for myself as well, which ended up being the surgebinding chart (second design).

https://www.designfind.com/designs/21814
https://www.designfind.com/designs/21815

Cosmere: The cosmere is a fictional shared universe where many of Brandon Sanderson's books take place.
I made this a separate post so that it could be searchable when people look for other Cosmere stuff on Tildes.

Hey friends,

I struggled hard to find a simple to-do list that would work the way I needed it to. Even the paid options weren't quite helpful for me. Eventually I just gave up and made my own.

I use it at work and at home every single day. I also made a backup copy to handle an individual project I'm working on.

Anyway, it's free. I just wanted to share it with you guys.

Small side notes

• To start using this, just copy it. It'll open in a read-only mode but you can quite easily pull it over to your own Google Drive.

• I threw in a donation link on the Sheet. Delete it or ignore it. It's 100% optional and I figured I'd put it there in case this ended up becoming someone's daily driver and they want to say thanks.

• You can somewhat easily make this sheet work with Google appsheet to use it on mobile as an app. That's what I do for mine so that I can use it on my phone and on desktop throughout the day. Just open appsheet from this sheet and start customizing your app. As long as you're using it for just yourself, you don't have to deploy it or anything. You just download the appsheet app on mobile and access it that way. You can even name it and choose a custom icon. The one caveat is that you'll have to create a time trigger in scripts to make it auto sort. If anyone is dying to do this, I'll post more specific details to help you through it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sIp4uPq3xwgudNA9tIOGmNXzETtyG421WbmvJPWgbsI/edit?usp=drivesdk

Hi all. I cook as often as I can and thought it might be fun to chat about any recipes you’ve tried or would like to try! I’m vegan so anything I post in this thread will be too. Maybe even share snacks or restaurants that are you’ve tried that you’ve liked!

To start is a simple sauce/stir fry recipe I make when I’m pretty tired after a long day:

Spicy salty sweet sauce:

1-2 tbsp gochugaru
1 tbsp white or black rice vinegar
1 tbsp mirin
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp agave or maple syrup
1 tsp corn starch

I usually put all of the ingredients together except for the corn starch and then set aside as I do the rest of the prep.

The rest of the recipe is a bit more variable as I have certain ingredients but looks like this:

1 cup cooked white rice OR hand pulled noodles

Noodle recipe:
250g all purpose flour
125 ml water
1/4-1/2 tsp salt
Canola oil

I add the flour, water, and salt to a bowl, mixing with my fingers. It starts to form pretty quickly into a mass. I knead the mass of dough into a ball until uniform. With the large, smooth dough ball I cut it into 8 pieces with a knife, roll them into a sort of prolate spheroid shape, and coat with canola oil. Put the oiled dough shapes into a bowl and cover with a damp towel. Let them rest for about an hour or so.

Heat a pot of water. Flatten the dough pieces into rectangles with a rolling pin. Use the rolling pin (if it’s a thin one, otherwise I use large chopsticks), to press the dough lengthways to create a sort of seam. Hold each end of the dough and slowly pull to stretch. Slap on counter as you pull a few times. Stretch it as long or short as you’d like. On the seam you made with the rolling pin, split the noodle apart so that the noodle is now a large loop. Put into the boiling water and wait roughly a minute /or until it’s floating. Can cook a few noodles at a time, though I usually do one or two and roll/pull while they boil.

With the noodles or rice done or going and the sauce almost ready, start to chop vegetables, maybe a cup or so of 2-3 types. I like Napa cabbage, squash, green onions, bell pepper, and carrots but really get whatever you’d like or have on hand at the time. Sauté the vegetables in a tbsp or so of oil (I use canola or olive), starting with onions/garlic and then adding others as you see fit. Once the vegetables are done to your liking, add the noodles or rice, then the sauce (adding in the corn starch to the sauce at this point) and stir.

Often I’ll actually fry a half block or block of tofu I’ve cubed before adding vegetables into the oil. I usually do this as the noodles (or if I’m doing a pot of rice, as it begins to cook) are about done resting, maybe with 15-20 mins to go, since frying tofu can take awhile.

I like to serve in bowls, topping with a dash of sesame oil, black sesame seeds, and fresh green onion.

I’ll post more recipes in the thread as I make them but this is probably the most frequent thing I make in a given week. Feel free to share your own!

Hello, Tildes

Allow me to introduce myself.

I came over to Tildes fairly recently after Twitterriffic died and Apollo announced it would shut down.

As a relative youngster, I tend to mostly browse on mobile.

While I do appreciate Tildes' philosophy of having a simple website that works well on desktop and mobile, I've always preferred mobile apps. I'm a strong believer that a well-built native application will always provide a richer experience than a website.

But enough talking.. showing is way more fun - here's a lil' something I've been messing around with:

Introducing Surfboard for Tildes

The goal is simple: to be the best way to interact with Tildes on mobile.

Features

Surfboard is still extremely early, and is missing many features.

With that said, here is what it currently supports:

• Login to Tildes (supports 2FA)
• Browse topics
• Filters & sorting
• Browse comments
• Advanced rendering is still in early stages..
• Supports comment collapsing behavior from the web version
• Reply/vote/bookmark/ignore on topics, comments, & notifications (requires login)
• Search topics
• Global search
• Search within groups
• Option for in-line images
• Clean browsing interface
• In-line markdown preview when composing replies
• Share topics & comments
• Notifications
• View read & unread notifications
• Reply, vote, bookmark, mark as read...
• Customizable
• Toggle settings, set custom gesture actions, etc.
• Free, as in beer

The design draws some inspiration from Apollo for Reddit, an app that I loved & am very sad will be discontinued.

Try it yourself

I would love to get some feedback from other Tildes users on the app. If you are interested in trying it for yourself, you can get it here via TestFlight

Surfboard is built for iPhone, and requires iOS 16.0 or higher.

Inside the app is a 'roadmap' of sorts which is basically a list of things I know are missing, but if there's something you want that isn't listed there, I'm all ears.

Formatting is a little rough at the moment, although I made enormous improvements on the parsing & rendering there over the last day.

It should support just about anything you throw at it other than a <details>

(I'll get around to them, I swear..)

If you run into issues viewing a post/comment, you can easily open them in an in-app safari window from the menu.

As mentioned above, it's very early, but it's already becoming my favorite way to browse Tildes. I hope that others will enjoy it as well. Consider it my gift to the Tildes community.

Cheers !

Edit:

The best way to submit feature requests & bug reports is to add it to the issue tracker and/or leave a comment on this thread and I’ll get around to adding it myself.

Thanks !

Since I know quite a few tilderinos use Kagi (far higher percentage than the standard population) I figured this might interest some of you.

Kagi pushed out a new Dark theme that is not dark. It's possibly even worse than Googles non-dark official Dark mode.

Here is a CSS fix you can throw in your custom css section in settings that I whipped up for some people in the Discord, should be useful.

    :root {  
  --custom-bg-color: #090c10;

  --search-result-gap: 20px;
  --search-result-gap-mobile: 10px;
  --app-bg: var(--custom-bg-color);
  --search-result-title: #fff;
  --primary-visited: #aaa;
  /*! --quick-search-bg: #000; */
  --color-search-input: var(--custom-bg-color);
  --result-item-title-border: rgba(255,255,255,0.25);
  --search-result-date-bg: rgba(255,255,255,0.15);
}

.__sri-time {
  font-size: 12px;
  border-radius: 2px;
  margin-right: 3px
}

.__sri-desc {
  padding-top: 3px;
}

.__sri-title {
  margin-bottom: 5px;
}

.__sri-url .__sri_url_path_box {
  margin-top: 0px;
}

@media screen and (max-width: 1300px) {
  .search-result, .sri-group {
    padding-top: 0px !important;
    padding-bottom: 0px !important;
    margin-bottom: var(--search-result-gap-mobile) !important;
  }
}  

This fixes the colors, padding, and some other general weirdness they introduced. They also don't follow their own variable specs so I introduced two new ones in there so you can modify to your liking (namely padding between links on mobile and desktop).

"Dominion of Darkness” is a strategy text game in which the player takes on the role of a Sauron-style Lord of Darkness with the goal of conquering the world. He will carry out his plans by making various decisions. He will build his army and send it into battles, weave intrigues and deceptions, create secret spy networks and sectarian cults, recruit agents and commanders, corrupt representatives of Free Peoples and sow discord among them, collect magical artifacts and perform sinister plots. Note – one game takes about 1 hour, but the premise is that the game can be approached several times, each time making different decisions, getting different results and discovering something new.

Game is avalaible for free, online: https://adeptus7.itch.io/dominion

If you are hesitant to play the game, I invite you to watch/listen to the reviews:

• Indie Sampler (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM6f4UCEgWU

• [BOKC] BlancoKix (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgNpSKToOSg

Gametje

Hi all been working on this project for a while in my spare time. I wanted to share it with this community to see what you all thought.

What is it?

It is a set of online games (currently only 2) which can be played in person with a central screen (like a TV) or remotely via video chat with screen sharing. Essentially there is a host screen and then each player has their own player screen (laptop or phone etc). It is playable in 8 languages at the moment (feel free to request any others!) It also has an integrated ChatGPT player which can be turned on/off in game settings if you prefer to play without it. There are some game mechanics to identify a ChatGPT answer which can yield some funny reactions if you choose a human's answer! It has Chromecast support and works well on Amazon Fire sticks. Visually, it is still a little rough around the edges as frontend design isn't my forte but the core concept is there. I have been play testing it with friends but have not shared it publicly yet.

Why is it called Gametje?

I have been living in the Netherlands for some years and my original motivation for starting this project was to create a game that supported languages other than English. I wanted to incorporate something Dutch into the name. tje is one of the diminutive endings in Dutch. It is usually meant to soften a word or make it "smaller". So Gametje -> a little game.

Where can I try it?

https://gametje.com/

You can either create an account (user/pass with email confirm) or try it out as a guest (navigate to either game, then choose continue as guest). Currently it is free to host a game. Happy to hear any feedback (both good and bad). Hopefully the host provider I am using to run the game will hold up.

Thanks!

Hello Tildes, I wanted to share with you a project that I have been working on for quite some time and have finally released.

63 is a modern version of the classic public domain party game known by many names, but listed on wikipedia as Celebrity. (Some people might know it as Hat Game, Fishbowl or by some of its commercial versions such as Time's Up or Monikers)

The game works exactly like all these other games except you only need your phone to play it, no pen and paper or decks of cards required. The game is pass-and-play so only one phone is needed for a any size group.

For this initial release, the english version of the game only has 2 packs of cards available to choose from (General and Celebrities) but my goal is to add more packs and create a platform where anyone can create and share their own packs of cards.

You can download the game now on Android or on iOS.

For those not familiar with the rules I'll leave a brief explanation below but inside the game there's a more comprehensive rule section and tutorial.

GAME RULES:

A random deck of cards is generated for each game based on the packs chosen. Each card represents a concept and the objective of the game is for teams to guess as many cards as possible.

Two teams take it in turns to guess cards. Each turn is 63 seconds long and the player from the active team holds the phone and gives clues to their teammates.

There are three rounds, each with different rules for giving clues:

ROUND 1 - Forbidden words
You can’t use words from the card’s title

ROUND 2 - Only one word!
You can't make sounds or gestures nor use any word in the card title

ROUND 3 - Charades!
Words are forbidden, only gestures and sounds are allowed

At the end of the three rounds the team with the most points wins!

This is one of the first places I've shared the project in, especially for a global audience (since the game is also fully in portuguese), so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Hope you enjoy 63!

Well, a few minutes ago I finally pushed the button, the game is released. So I wanted to write a short write up of some things that I had to do to release the game. I won't really talk about making the game itself too much, more about the part of actually releasing the game, if you are interested in more of that you can see my posts from Timasomo (1, 2, 3, 4, showcase).

Steam

I have already created many games in the past, I've been making games for more than 5 years, but always as a hobbyist. So I never experienced releasing a game on a platform like Steam. I have to say working with Steam and Steamworks is very pleasant and streamlined, but it is still much more complex than for example releasing a game on itch.io, which is what I did before for all my other games. I'll try to summarize how the process looks like.

First, before you can even get on Steam, you have to register, fill out a ton of paperwork, wait some time for it to be manually approved. Afterwards, you have to pay the 100 dollars for Steam Direct. At this point you finally get a Steam app id, which you can use to start integrating Steam features into your game. For example, having achievements, Steam cloud integration (so the saves get synced between devices), leaderboards and potentially more, especially if you are making a multiplayer game. To make my game I am using Godot, and I found a C# library called Facepunch.Steamworks which made this all quite easy, I'd definitely recommend it if you are using Unity or Godot with C# and want to release your game on Steam.

Before releasing a game on Steam you also have to finish everything on a gigantic checklist, including things like: uploading 10 various header, capsule and other images which are used on the store page and Steam library. An icon for the game. What are the minimum requirements required to run the game, whether the game has adult content, whether it supports controllers, how much the game will cost, screenshots, a trailer, there are just so many things to do! And when you complete parts of this checklist you have to have your game go through manual reviews. Each review could take about 3 days to get done. I failed one review first so I had to resubmit it too and wait again. Let me tell you, if you plan to release a game on Steam, reserve at least a month to do it, and start going through the reviews as soon as possible -- actually I think there even is a minimum of a month before you can release the game from the day you get an app id.

Trailer

Creating a good trailer is super hard. I am not a video creator/editor at all, but luckily I at least own a solid program for creating videos -- Vegas 14 pro, that I got for super cheap in some Humble bundle about 8 or something years ago, so I at least had a good start there. I ended up with not that complex of a project and Vegas still kept crashing when rendering, so I am not sure if I'd recommend it though.

The hardest thing for a trailer is deciding what to put in it for me. I know that a trailer should be super short, should showcase how the gameplay looks, what are the features and so on, but when I got to actually making it, it was still super hard to decide what to put there. How do I even start? I watched a ton of other indie game trailers to get some inspiration and that also didn't help that much. There are some trailers which are really just gameplay, some trailers which are actually just incredible with editing I could never do as a pleb... So I started with something that I know a bit more. I created a very short music track, and decided that I will just edit the trailer to fit the music.

The music track basically splits the trailer into 4/5 very short sections:

• Basic gameplay, how the game looks when you start playing it
• Explaining the roguelite part of the game, selecting spells and items
• More complex gameplay, how some combinations of spells and items can look later in a run
• List of features
• Special bonus ending section showing a "Legendary" spell, which should show how insane spells can get, followed by the logo of the game

I think the trailer ended up being not too bad, but I still had some feedback that it isn't flashy enough. And it's true, but I am not really sure how to improve it easily. When watching the Vampire Survivors trailer for example I can see that they did a much better job: it's so much more dynamic, the music really pumps you up, it's overall better edited, it has cool transitions, camera movement and so on.

End

Releasing a game on Steam was a great experience. I learned so much! I basically made this game over weekends and evenings, since I also have a job. To try maintain my productivity I tried to do at least some work on the game every single day. I have to say that towards the end I started losing some steam (haha), some days scrambling to do at least something late in the evening before I went to sleep. But, if at least someone plays the game I think I want to keep updating it more, I still do really like the game!

Thanks for reading! Feel free to ask me anything about the game, or the game dev process, or about anything basically haha.

Here's the Steam store page, the game costs 5 dollars, I'd love it if you checked it out. If you want to play the game but can't afford it PM me and I'll send you a key for the game (at least once I get the keys I requested -- did you know that Steam has to approve the creation of keys manually? Edit: the keys are now ready)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2682910/The_Spellswapper/